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4 Questions to help you sneak up on an illustration project.

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4 Questions to help you sneak up on an illustration project.

On composing an illustration

Adam Ming
Jan 12, 2022
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4 Questions to help you sneak up on an illustration project.

adamming.substack.com

I had a chat with my illustration mentor this morning.

We talked about ways to approach an illustration. I tried t distilled my notes from the chat into 4 questions that I can ask myself when approving a new spread for a picturebook or editorial illustration.

I even used the questions for the illustration of this newsletter.

Here they are:

  1. How would I draw this if I drew this from imagination?

  2. How can I bend reality to my artistic vision?

  3. How do I design a scene, that’s easy to draw in my style?

  4. How can I apply my illustration logic to this piece?


Up for discussion: I find these questions to be a great way to sneak up on a blank page and increase my odds for success. Which of these questions do you find the most helpful? Do you know of any other approaches? Leave a comment with your thoughts!

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4 Questions to help you sneak up on an illustration project.

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Kimberley Adams
Writes This week...
Jan 19, 2022Liked by Adam Ming

Such great questions! I am totally going to use these questions too! It can be really hard to decide an approach and like Sophie, kind of struggled to ask what I wanted to get out of this as an illustration.

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Sophie Benmouyal
Jan 12, 2022Liked by Adam Ming

I like this approach. These are kind of the questions I asked myself this week, looking at the first MATS assignment for Redrawing Black History. My main question was: what do I want to get how of this? The answer gave me all of a new perspective on what to illustrate, on the layout, on the style to use. Love today's illustration!

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